[01] My first computer, and my life of piracy at age 9

My grandfather was an early adopter of the IBM PC/XT, their early foray into the personal computing field inhabited largely by Apple and some others.  I was 7 or 8 at the time, so I don't remember all the details, but it initially had an amber monochrome screen and only one 5 1/4" floppy drive, to which he later added a second.  He also added a hard drive, likely a 10 megabyte one.

It looked very much like this, with a printer by its side.

Together, we played what was my first adventure game.  A shareware classic named Castle Adventure, written by a 14 year-old kid, although I hadn't noticed the typos and bad grammar at the time.  I do plan to do a detailed post on this game -- and try to solve it with a fresh set of eyes 30+ years later.  [Edit: I've since done this, for The Adventurer's Guild.]

You can play it online now, too.

Grandpa would do a screen print to his daisy-wheel printer (later to be replaced by a dot matrix).  We taped these printouts together, although since the rooms weren't designed equally sized, after a while it became both unwieldy and overlapping (sadly, we didn't have any of the QuestBusters Mapping Paper to draw it on.).

The next year, I would get a computer of my own.  Grandpa got it for me at a mom & pop computer store near his home, USR Computers.  Like most clones of the time, it was build from generic parts, with their sticker slapped on the front.  My 8086-based machine had a 10-meg hard disk, a floppy drive, a CGA monitor, and a standard 83-key keyboard.  F1-F10 were on the left, and there was no separate arrow keys, so games either used WASD, or, more commonly for MS-DOS games, the numeric keypad.

The computer came pre-loaded with MS-DOS 2.1 or so, and on accompanying floppies, a few games from the computer shop to help start my computing life.  My first three pirated games, although of course, I didn't understand that it was wrong then.

Dig Dug, the PC version from around 1983

Zaxxon, a 1982 isometric flight shooter, also in all it's CGA glory.

Burgertime as well, although it barely ran on my computer

Loading these up on DosBox now, I have a feeling that I never got past the first level of DigDug.  I'm not sure my heart was in it. (Here's another recent take on DigDug, although the prettier arcade version.)  If I had played it in the arcades, it was semi-historic: it was the first title Atari imported to use in their cabinets, developed by the video game greats Namco.

Zaxxon, on the other hand, I was very skilled at for the time, and could get some impressive finishes.  Sadly, I've lost all those skills.  

These were my earliest games, and much higher quality than most of the shareware titles Grandpa would find for us after that.  We would browse the PC-SIG Catalog, a book listing of hundreds of disks available, for just a few bucks each with shipping. Before I was later exposed to the BBS scene a few years later, that was the best way to get new software at the time.

Many of Grandpa's disks looked like this, and I would proceed to copy them for myself.  Although I doubt we had the Stock Market Timer.

Next time, we'll talk about other ways that we got software, and some more early favorites.

Sources and inspirational reading for this post:

High Score!: The Illustrated History of Electronic Games by Rusel DeMaria and Johnny L. Wilson